A mysterious large mass of material has been discovered beneath the Moon's South Pole-Aitken basin, the largest crater in our solar system.

The crater, thought to have been created about 4 billion years ago, is oval-shaped and as wide as 2,000 kilometers (roughly the distance between Waco, Texas, and Washington, D.C.) and several miles deep. Despite its size, it cannot be seen from Earth because it is on the far side of the Moon. 

Industrial processes in the United States produce 8 gigagrams of methane emissions per year, according to experts. But Environmental Defense Fund, using a sensor on a Google street view car, is claiming otherwise in a recent article they paid to publish in a small Berkeley-based journal (Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene) that promotes stories about how humans are killing the planet.

This asteroid is now known to miss. It was always classified as NO HAZARD so it was no surprise at all when they proved it couldn’t hit.

UPDATE - they proved it would miss in July through non detection.

On July 4th and 5th they focused on the small patch of sky where it would have to be if approaching Earth. It wasn't there, so can't hit. It is the first example of ruling out an impact through non deteciton.

ESA and ESO confirm asteroid will miss Earth in September | EarthSky.org

In a new survey, 80 percent of gun owners support the concept of personalized guns, referred to as "smart" guns because they include safety features like fingerprint locks to help prevent use by unauthorized individuals. But only 18 percent are willing to buy them.

People who smoke marijuana and are considering having children in the future need to be aware about four serious issues that may impact both men and women according to an article ("Five things to know about ... marijuana and fertility" - the title says five things, but there are only four, the fifth is a plea to send more money) in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

The following is useful information for people who may want to conceive. 

Four things to know about marijuana and fertility:

Scientists continue to gain ground in the race against wheat stem rust, a pathogen that threatens global food security because of its ability to kill wheat. The new chink in nature's armor was discovered in the first rust virulence molecule that wheat plants detect to 'switch on' built-in resistance and stave off the disease.

Dog owners insist that 'all dogs are puppies', which means our beliefs about their cuteness are not conditional on age, but a paper in Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People and Animals, suggests otherwise. The authors found that dogs' attractiveness to humans peaks at roughly eight weeks, the same point in time at which their mother weans them and leaves them to fend for themselves.

This asteroid is now known to miss. It was always classified as NO HAZARD so it was no surprise at all when they proved it couldn’t hit.

UPDATE - they proved it would miss in July through non detection.

On July 4th and 5th they focused on the small patch of sky where it would have to be if approaching Earth. It wasn't there, so can't hit. It is the first example of ruling out an impact through non deteciton.

ESA and ESO confirm asteroid will miss Earth in September | EarthSky.org

To many in the west, Siberia is synonymous with remote winter gulags where dissidents go to die. A new simulation estimates that if climate change occurs according to more aggressive models, the end of the century might see it as a pretty nice place to love. Russia east of the Urals towards the Pacific accounts for 77 percent of Russia's land area - 13 million square kilometers. Its population, however, is just 27 percent and is concentrated along the forest-steppe in the south, which has a comfortable climate and fertile soil. 

There are lots of paradoxes in nature but one - how earthquakes along mid-ocean ridges are linked with low tides - may have revealed a mechanism.

The mechanism is the magma below the mid-ocean ridges.

"It's the magma chamber breathing, expanding and contracting due to the tides, that's making the faults move," says Christopher Scholz, a seismologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Low tide correlation to earthquakes is surprising because of the way the mid-ocean fault moves. The fault as a tilted plane that separates two blocks of earth. During movement, the upper block slides down with respect to the lower one.